The lost golden age of language diversity

Tens of thousands of languages may have existed between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago - and their decline began well before European colonial expansion

Contemporary languages and endangerment status (made with a Natural Earth base map using data from Glottolog 5.3 and information adapted from GlottoScope).

Fewer languages before agriculture: The researchers estimate that between approximately 4,500 and 6,200 languages were spoken at the beginning of the Holocene, around 12,000 years ago - probably fewer than the roughly 7,500 languages spoken and signed today.

A linguistic “golden age”: As the global human population grew, language diversity also increased. The models suggest that tens of thousands of languages may have existed between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago.

A deep history of language loss: The decline in linguistic diversity appears to have begun with the expansion of large states and empires, long before modern European colonialism.

Today’s languages are survivors : The languages spoken today represent a small and historically biased sample of past linguistic diversity, with important implications for how researchers explain global patterns in language and culture.

Today, people speak or sign around 7,500 languages. Yet this figure provides only a snapshot of a constantly changing history. How many languages existed before written records? Did agriculture reduce linguistic diversity by allowing expanding farming populations to replace smaller hunter-gatherer groups? Or did population growth initially create more opportunities for new languages to emerge?

An international research team involving researchers from Spain, the USA and Germany have reconstructed plausible trajectories of global language diversity across the last 12,000 years. Their study, published in Science , suggests that language diversity increased for most of the Holocene, reached a remarkable peak between approximately 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, and then declined rapidly thereafter.

“This paper presents an innovative approach to understanding the dynamics of human cultural diversity in the past, addressing one of the central yet least accessible questions in the human sciences. Progress has been limited not by a lack of theoretical interest but by the exceptional difficulty of observing the relevant dynamics empirically”, says Marcus Hamilton of the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Direct evidence for the number of languages is almost entirely absent before the appearance of writing around 6,000 years ago, and remains fragmentary until quite recently. The researchers therefore combined ethnographic information, estimates of prehistoric population size, and statistical and social-computational modelling.